Created in 1917 for the Third Liberty Loan Campaign, this poster featuring Lady Liberty and a Boy Scout gives us a good idea of how far the Godless and the Sodomites have come in America. While US society as a whole is now a lot closer to the morality of the Cities of the Plain, the Scouts are still rather uptight about both of these categories, however, and along with gays, satanists, paedophiles and transsexuals, atheists are routinely excluded from membership.
"A tiresome, self-pitying bunch whose primary motivation isn't rationalism but anger" — That's the verdict on atheists of Charlotte Allen, author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. And in an article entitled Atheists: No God, just whining, published in the LA Times and the Guardian, she tells us in no uncertain terms why she holds that view.
Among the highlights:
My problem with atheists is their tiresome – and way old – insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What – did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?
Read Dawkins, or Hitchens, or the works of fellow atheists Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), or visit an atheist website or blog (there are zillions of them, bearing such titles as God Is for Suckers, God Is Imaginary and God Is Pretend), and your eyes will glaze over as you peruse – again and again – the obsessively tiny range of topics around which atheists circle like water in a drain.
First off, there's atheist victimology: Boohoo, everybody hates us 'cuz we don't believe in God. Although a recent Pew Forum survey on religion found that 16% of Americans describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, only 1.6% call themselves atheists, with another 2.4% weighing in as agnostics (a group despised as wishy-washy by atheists). You or I might attribute the low numbers to atheists' failure to win converts to their unbelief, but atheists say the problem is persecution so relentless that it drives tens of millions of God-deniers into a closet of feigned faith, like gays before Stonewall....
And then there's the question of why atheists are so intent on trying to prove that God not only doesn't exist but is evil to boot. Dawkins, writing in The God Delusion, accuses the deity of being a "petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak" as well as a "misogynistic, homophobic, racist ... bully." If there is no God – and you'd be way beyond stupid to think differently – why does it matter whether he's good or evil?
The problem with atheists – and what makes them such excruciating snoozes – is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God's existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have made attempting to reconcile, say, God's omniscience with free will or God's goodness with human suffering. Atheists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridiculous absurdity, the "flying spaghetti monster" of atheists' typically lame jokes. They think that lobbing a few Gaza-style rockets accusing God of failing to create a world more to their liking ("If there's a God, why aren't I rich?" "If there's a God, why didn't he give me two heads so I could sleep with one head while I get some work done with the other?") will suffice to knock down the entire edifice of belief.
What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn't rationalism but anger – anger that the world isn't perfect, that someone forced them to go to church as children, that the Bible contains apparent contradictions, that human beings can be hypocrites and commit crimes in the name of faith. The vitriol is extraordinary. Hitchens thinks that "religion spoils everything". Dawkins contends that raising one's offspring in one's religion constitutes child abuse. Harris argues that it "may be ethical to kill people" on the basis of their beliefs. The perennial atheist litigant Michael Newdow sued (unsuccessfully) to bar President Obama from uttering the words "so help me God" when he took his oath of office.
What atheists don't seem to realise is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?
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Who killed Hariri? Will Hitch drop Assad indictment?
Who blew Lebanese businessman cum politician Rafik Hariri away and why? Conspiracy theories abound, not the wackiest of which is Hitch's insinuation that Syrian President Bashar Assad was behind it. The explosion, estimated to have packed a blast equivalent to 300kg of dynamite, made a crater 10 metres wide and 1 metre deep. Now Der Spiegel is clearing Assad and trotting out a new villian.
Always oozing with confidence and often flushed with certainty, Christopher Hitchens is not a writer who could ever stand accused of understating his case. There is something reminiscent of the Olympic downhill skier about his polemic style that allows his prose to slide or glide over inconvenient facts that block the serpentine way towards his prearranged conclusions as if they were mere flagpoles marking out the course. And how the fanboys cheer him all the way to the finish line regardless of how many red ones he demolishes on the way down.
Among the many many finish lines he's crossed in this way to loud applause in some quarters are those that have found Bill Clinton to be a serial rapist and war criminal; Henry Kissinger a war criminal and an inciter and enabler of genocide; Saddam Hussein a hoarder of yellowcake and weapons of mass destruction; the present Iranian government an aspiring wiper of Israel off the map, Sidney Blumenthal a perjurer, Joe Wilson clueless, Wanda Sykes not funny, and Scooter Libby an innocent victim who rather than rotting in jail should be sent back into the arms of his poor white-haired old mother.
Some of these conclusions have been on firmer snow than others, of course, but none are quite as cut and dried as Hitchens would have us believe. And Hitchens's by now long established method of arguing like a lawyer or a conman rather than like a journalist has contributed greatly to his growing reputation, deserved or not, as a consummate liar, a bullshit artist supreme, and as someone whose word is generally not to be trusted.
Hence many observers, myself included, were reluctant to take Christopher at his word when he insisted on a number of occasions, despite an absence of proof, that the Syrian Government was obviously behind the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri. In December 2008, for instance, in reporting on the terror attacks in Bombay, Hitch elected to bring up his conspiracy theory about events in Lebanon in support of his conspiracy theory about events in Bombay:
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
As I'm sure many readers will have noticed, Hitch's "known facts" consist purely of assertions and innuendos, in keeping with his well-known modus operandi as a slime merchant. But until recently, the Syrians have had as little success in convincing the world that they didn't knock off Hariiri as the Libyans had in denying culpability for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 or the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside its London Embassy in St. James's Square in 1984, let alone for the attack on Marty, Doc and Einstein in Back to the Future. When you are the terrorist nation du jour in the Western mainstream media, it's only natural that you are guilty until proven innocent.
Now, however, we have a Western mainstream media source that clears the Syrians of involvement in Hariri's assassination, much to Hitch's chagrin no doubt. The source is Erich Follath in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, which is doubly interesting because this was the very same journalist and the very same journal that came out with "new evidence" pointing to Syrian guilt in an exclusive published on October 24, 2005.
The latest Der Spiegel article, dated May 24, 2009, is entitled Breakthrough in Tribunal Investigation: New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder. This is a scenario I'm sure Hitch can live with, and no doubt he'll be tweeking his Hariri files to point to the new bad guys before too long. Apparently, the problem is that, just as with the 2005 article, no real proof is presented and the sources of the information are not named. Franklin Lamb in Beirut has an in-depth article on this story.
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Hitchens V. D'Souza. Again. Yes, You Read That Right, They're STILL Doing This
Our Ronin has certainly moved quite a lot of paper during this Dylanesque Never Ending Tour for god Is Not Great of his, an entire rainforest's worth in fact. And partnering up with other traveling mountebanks on occasion, like Dinesh D'Souza, has been instrumental in this. These joint book-sales of theirs, er, I mean these epic philosophical debates in the tradition of Lincoln and Douglas, have undoubtedly synergized, like two merging corporations, his book promotions with a great marketing gimmick, helping Hitch strike a bonanza of sales. And even more ominously, as our Popinjay lusts after glory more than riches, The Book Tour That Knows No End is having the alarming effect of planting Hitchens' vile name in article after article in the press on the New Atheism, to the point of maddening cliche. "The New Atheism is on the rise, authors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are... blah blah blah" etc.. etc. You know the story. Nearly every New Atheism article nowadays has to have the obligatory Hitchens reference.
Yes, with a little luck, Hitchens is on route to becoming the next Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
For earnest Atheists out there this should be our ultimate nightmare come to life, because, amongst other reasons, Hitchens as an atheist is a total fraud and in fact an outright agent of Abrahamism because of his collaboration with Christianist Republicans, America's Party Of God, his apologetics for them, and his advocacy of polices that are augmenting religion, like America's terrifying Overseas Contingency Operations (tremble at the mere mention of that euphemism!). Hitchens is analogous to Russian Orthodox clerics who decided during World War II to collaborate with the atheistic Soviet Union, a government that was actively and brutally repressing religion.
Chris' little book tour does not make up for this.
This April, in the latest episode in a whole franchise of sequels that even Hollywood executives would find offensive, D'Souza and Hitchens "crossed swords" once again, as D'Souza put it. Another apt analogy from one of Hitchens' partners, er, arch-adversaries. You can find the whole spiel on this gentleman's Youtube channel.
The Hitchens-D'Souza debates have become so repetitive, stale, hackneyed, and just plain disappointing, as they've consisted of almost nothing new whatsoever each time, that they leave one feeling an acute case of deja vu afterwords--yet the duo still are shamelessly performing these dog and pony shows, and there's even another one lined up for September.
In this week's debate, the demagogic D'Souza is admittedly infotaining, and there is a moment or two where he almost shows signs of potentially having something interesting to say. For instance, in his opening statement he argues that Africa, China, Korea, Brazil, and much of the Global South, are experiencing a massive resurgence of religion, particularly Christianity, so to the contrary, Christendom is not at a nadir, but a zenith.
D'Souza's contention here, while specious, at least has some substance to it, and the point is significant enough to warrant a response from the Atheist side. But does Hitchens even bother to refute it, let alone address it? Of course not. Hitchens always ducks any tough questions that are thrown at him, he usually just quickly changes the subject to belt out his usual boilerplate, or outright ignores them. How many debates have we had to suffer through with Hitchens just standing there and tacitly conceding some of D'Souza's most overreaching arguments? One would think that this would be like shooting fish in a barrel given that pretty much all of D'Souza's assertions are ballyhoo, red herrings and other types of fish stories, like D'Souza's ridiculous conceit that he's making a case for Christianity on purely rational grounds (as if one could make a case for the Resurrection without requiring faith).
Alas, our Popinjay is too busy showering all sorts of ludicrous praise upon the middling D'Souza to actually bother refuting his arguments. "Ingenious!" the Hitch coos repeatedly throughout the debate. "I can almost see why people hold it when I hear you talk!" purrs Hitchens after D'Souza makes some lame apologetic. "The best debater on any subject I've ever encountered!" the Popinjay squawks.
I think I'm probably not the only one out there who is getting sick to the stomach listening to these two slobber all over each other, to an extent that is truly worthy of the term ad nauseum.
Yes, the Preening Popinjay seems to be swooning over the demagogic D'Souza. Hell, maybe D'Souza is slowly converting Chris to Christianity, just like how he allegedly converted Hitchens to capitalism. Given how erratic and all over the map our boy is, who knows, maybe he will go God on us. He certainly does have that "can't beat 'em, join 'em" mentality, and a predilection for abruptly taking the diametrical opposite to his current view from time to time.
We wish D'Souza the best of luck on this. He can have his Hitchens. Chris is a cancer that is insidiously metastasizing throughout the Atheist movement and poisoning it from within, so he's all D'Souza's, if it was up to me.
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Plug into the faithless: Hitch and the pie-in-the-sky soreheads
Hitchens has become Col. Tom Parker, and atheism is his Elvis. While his book sails off the shelf and he receives fulsome intros from star-struck Catholic priests, his relationship with his fellow right leaning bully boys can sometimes become strained. Indeed Hugh Hewitt went as far as to brand him a anti-religion bigot in one of their rare contentious exchanges.
It is interesting, then, to consider a little further Mark R Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservatives Manifesto, the nutball bestseller being devoured by all those conservatives who no longer have the gumption to wear their Rush on their sleeves.
As Hitch calls his anti-God mission "the fastest growing movement in the Country", it is interesting to consider point nine in Levin's Manifesto, entitled "Faith": "Oppose all efforts to denude the nation of it's founding justification: that is, God-given unalienable natural rights that the Government can neither confer on the individual nor deny to him. The Statist seeks the authority to do both, which explains his contempt for and misuse of faith. Moreover, faith provides the moral order that ties one generation to the next, and without which civil society cannot survive."
As Pauline Kael once wrote, "it would probably be impossible for a cynic to fake this. Levin has constructed a paragraph of such towering balderdash and egomaniacal license one could almost miss the paranoia lurking beneath. We might like to ask the crazed Levin just how these Statists are going to denude "a God-given unalienable natural right that can neither be conferred or denied...just who is backing these liberals...could it be......SATAN?
If anything, the major sweet deal (or bribe) religion has always enjoyed the fruits of in the U.S. has only expanded. The deal has been since those early days; stay out of politics and we will give you massive tax breaks. While this has led to a kind of "tyranny" that Levin would never be honest enough to cop to (the non-religious subsidize the religious), it's mostly worked although both the right and left have more recently abused the church/state line. Complaints about this, however, are something you are not going to hear even from a professional faith baiter like Hitch.
So, while Christian libertarians enjoy a massive freebie from the State, they must play the victim of imaginary persecution from "Statist" forces who "misuse faith" (Christians who don't vote Republican?) and want to take away from him what cannot be taken. Again, one thinks of Harry Stein avoiding those debates with smug lefties who won't even speak to him.
Oddly enough, these are now Hitch's people. We can probably assume Hitch will stick to mocking the original text of the Good Book rather than confronting nonsense like Levin's.
This recent confrontation on Fox News between Jesse Ventura and Brian Kilmeade makes very interesting viewing. After defending the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, Brian begins quivering when Jesse suggests he should be waterboarded too. In trying to come up with a reason why he personally should be spared such an ordeal, he says, "I'm not blowing up America. I'm not trying to destroy this country. I'm not trying to fight against democracy everywhere we go."
All things considered, this wasn't such a bad answer, because remember, Brian was concentrating most of his attention on trying to avoid wetting his pants at the time, a problem that sent him dashing from the studio with his knees together just a moment later. However, I think the gentleman protested a little too much. Nobody had accused him of any of the sins in question, but his haste to deny them, he invites suspicion. Brian is a vocal advocate pre-emptive torture and he displays several of the classic signs of guilt in the shape of an unsteady gaze, a whiny voice and an overly-defensive manner. A little bit of waterboarding, and just a few slivers of bamboo beneath the fingernails would set the authorities' minds at rest, because who knows what he and his associates may be planning or what information they may be concealing, and it's far better to be safe than sorry.
Wanda has a few words of advice that Hitch would do well to take to heart.
Aware of the readership of this blog's incessant demands for high-quality commentary that's idiosyncratic, informative, incisive and uncompromisingly funny, I was laying in bed last night scratching the old cranium and groaning about having to put together yet another an enormously witty post on one or other of the foibles of Christopher Hitchens. This time it was to have been about his Wanda Sykes quip and Hitch's real "dyke" problem: namely, his increasingly embarrassing efforts to plug the gaping holes in the battered and crumbling old reputation-guarding embankment of sod and gravel now barely covered by a tattered tarpaulin of intellectualism that is all that keeps the rotting remains of his credibility from being washed away by the rising torrents of his own invective.
Fortunately, others have been there before me and done a fine job of describing the state of decay. The most succinct effort I've seen so far is from Tommy Christopher at Politics Daily, who filed Chris Hitchens Has More Advice for 'Black Dyke' Wanda Sykes.
Author and uber-contrarian Christopher Hitchens couldn't leave well enough alone when it came to his offensive and bigoted assessment of Wanda Sykes' performance at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
While some folks cut him slack by surmising that he was probably drunk when he called Sykes "the black dyke," Hitchens "cleverly" wants us all to know he meant it by referring to her twice as "the Sable Sapphist" in an article at Slate. Funny stuff, you fornicating little pink star.
As if that wasn't insulting enough, the premise of Hitchens' piece was to school Wanda, and any other artist of the brick wall backdrop, on the Hitchens method of stand-up comedy. Hitchens' problem seems to be with the fact that Sykes didn't adhere to the roast-y tradition of the dinner and mock President Obama. He might have a point there, but that has nothing to do with whether or why she was funny, or not.
He also launches into the President, claiming he's not a "natural wit." That may be true, if the definition of "natural wit" is the ability to translate "black dyke" into "Sable Sapphist." I thought we were calling that "seventh grader."
Poor Hitch! If only he'd kept his pen sheathed on this, we might have thought his initial comment was just another booze-fueled and vindictive attack of Tourette's by a disappointed and bitter hack. But in devoting an entire Fighting Words column to the issue of why the black dyke isn't funny, he has merely made himself look ridiculous.
On top of that, in a faux pas that won't be quickly forgotten nor forgiven in Blighty, he managed to mix up two enormously different comics: the grossly sexist Les Dawson, who was much loved for his mother-in-law jokes, and the mildly racist Jim Davidson. To get Dawson confused with Bernard Manning would be understandable; but to conflate Dawson with Davidson is to demonstrate a level of ignorance of British comedy that is truly sublime. It is also just the sort of error that is liable to make an otherwise amusing anecdote fall flat on its face like an out-of-place pun at a presidential press bash.
A ten-minute introduction to Les Dawson, courtesy of Eamonn Andrews and co.
Hitch's extreme defensiveness on the subject of his "black dyke" outburst led him to conclude his Slate column by stretching his argument well past breaking point:
I absolutely believe that jokes should always be at some one's expense. But for that very reason they must also be highly amusing and—just perhaps—imaginable when told of one's own "community." Low score for Sykes on both counts....
Any tendency to narcissism doubles the need for a follow-up speaker who can make the president wince, not smirk. This we did not get. And Limbaugh's dependence, like Bush's dyslexia, is actually a disability. Can you easily picture any jokes from the Sable Sapphist that would in any other way breach the protocols of the Americans With Disabilities Act? Any other person of whom she would dare say, "I hope his kidneys fail"? Any other context in which torture would be funny enough for her to yell, "He needs a water-boarding, that's what he needs"? Reality and comedy check here: Would she even say this about Osama Bin Laden?
When comedians flatter the president, they become court jesters, and the country becomes a banana republic. There are probably even people who would wish to misconstrue that last phrase of mine if they felt "sensitive" enough. In which case they can take a number, get on line, and ask to suck my thumb.
Reality check here, didn't the Preening Popinjay himself actually say of Al Gore and Hilary Clinton: "I just hope they all get some sort of wasting disease before they can run"? And wasn't that bone-shattering funny at the time?
We all remember, thanks to George Galloway, just who it was that held down the job of "court jester at the court of the Bourbon Bushes." And we all know how hard life can be for courtiers who loose their place due to dynastic changes.
However much of a pass Obama continues to receive from nervous segments of the left, and however much the dopey carnival of the Big Limbuagh Tent is imitated by CNBC (See "The Daily Howler", almost daily), we should take a moment and glance at the possibly effective doorstops being thrust into our local booksellers by Hitch's old comrades on the "Bush in 2004" front. They publish, we parish.
There is a kick to the 90 proof wine of sour grapes in Bernard Goldberg's "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Store of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media" that might even put Hitch under the table. Some selective truths here, to be sure. Yet Goldberg's shamelessness is such that he declares 2008 the most bias performance of the Press in history.
The "goring" of Al Gore in 2000, where the press put words in the candidates mouth and then, without giving examples, repeated called him a liar, somehow doesn't come up. Al of this is documented, again, with examples galore in "The Daily Howler", where Goldberg's antics have likewise been subjected to scrutiny. The one two punch of the right wing bully-boy, insulting with one hand and calling for civility (more in sadness than in anger, don't you know) gets the customary work out. Oh yeah, the six year free pass 9-11 somehow handed Bush is also missing in action in this tale of liberal bias.
Goldberg is occasionally funny and about as often makes a valid point. For those with the the stamina to venture deeper into the naked id of the raging conservovictim, there is the harrowing self-pity of Roger L. Simon's "Blacklisting Myself." If you ever suspected that those who spent nearly a decade on Monica Lewinsky jokes were actually fairly humor impaired (Simon once managed to make an unfunny film with Woody Allen and Bette Midler), your sorry confirmation awaits in these pages.
Simon takes the content free conservo-book into a new realm of soggy downlift. Because of the cruel talk about poor W, Simon can't even function in his social circles anymore; and he no longer joins the Paul Mazursky gang for coffee at The Farmer's Market. Taking this social critique of Obama era savagery down a nutball notch is Harry Stein's "I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next To a Republican."
Poor Harry, he can't believe he has to confront leftists who won't even TALK to him anymore, because of his non-liberal views. Thank God, Harry even includes a list of local haunts were he can go talk to a strictly conservative clientele. That way, he doesn't have to talk to the people who won't even talk to him anymore. Along the way, he gets to avoid the views of "lunatics" like Noam Chomsky. Bonus points: the inevitable scene where a relative calls the right winger out on racism and of course has to back down, more in sadness than in anger.
Leading the pack in sales and feigned rationality is Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto" where we are given perhaps our last warning about the thumbscrews of the Estate Tax and the cruel rack of the social safety net. "Tyranny", I'll perhaps needlessly note, is a word applied as freely as the dance moves of a juiced up deadhead. Beyond that,there is the standard dubious account of our Founding Slaveholders. Hands off, of course, our wildly expensive socialist state within a state we call the Military. Because, you know, the Founding Fathers thought the Military should be huge and get whatever it wants without question.
The libertarian conservative is in a rather tricky place. Jesse Ventura talks about how both parties just want to take your money and spend it. Yet Bill Clinton did, seemingly, most of what a libertarian could rightfully ask for. Demonized by the left for cuts in social spending and plummeted by everyone else for assaulting Levin's poor little tyrannized super rich, he left the Country solvent and swimming in surpluses. Harry Stein's reaction to this was "anybody but a Democrat", as he now tries, like Hitchens, to weasel away from the global disaster of the W years.
Well, no talk show host, even in our newly uncivil world, will bring up such impolite matters to a man like Jesse. How about another Monica joke?
Shimon Peres with his old friend Henry Kissinger. Both have been compared to Machiavelli, but this is a unfair on the Florentine, who was a true philosopher, a genuine Renaissance Man, and nothing like as Machiavellian in his dealings as these two old rogues have been.
Early this May, Christopher Hitchens sat down for an interview with Israeli President Shimon Peres. He writes about the encounter in the Slate column: President of Which Israel? I was looking forward to reading it because we know from experience that Hitch is unafraid of asking candid questions and also because Peres has a lot questionable history behind him. But alas, it was not to be. Hitch settled instead for a round of softball questions, and the column is essentially an exercises in selling Peres as a moderate and pragmatic leader than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in case nobody had noticed that. But the lack of bark, let alone bite, in this piece is palpable, and Hitch makes an excuse of sorts, although not an apology, for his lack of aggression in the warm-up paragraph.
If we'd had time, I would have wanted to ask him about the days in 1956, of which he is now the sole living witness, when the governments of Britain, France, and Israel met secretly in a French villa to plan the invasion and occupation of Egypt. I should also have liked to ask him about his other achievement at the Israeli Defense Ministry, when Israel became the possessor of a nuclear facility at Dimona, in the Negev Desert.
I too would have liked Hitch to have asked about Peres's youthful exploits. He was born Szymon Perski in 1923 in Vishnevo (Wiszniewo), a small town in a part of Poland that is now in Belarus. The family moved to Palestine in 1934, which was fortunate for them as the bulk of the Jewish population of his hometown disappeared during the Second World War, mostly murdered by the SS.
It would have been interesting to hear about Peres talking about Mandate Palestine and the early days of the State of Israel. He was militarily active in the years leading up to the foundation of Israel, joining the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah in 1947. Allied with the British, the Haganah had fought against the Urgun, which was violently anti-Arab and anti-British. But in 1946, while these two groups were working as allies, Urgun operatives disguised as Arabs bombed the central offices of the British Mandatory Authorities of Palestine at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. This atrocity ended the alliance.
Peres was active in government from the early years of the State of Israel. In 1954, as Director General of the Ministry of Defense, he played a central role in the failed covert operation in Egypt that become known as the Lavon Affair, in which Israeli military intelligence planted bombs in Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt in the hope of blaming "the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, or other unspecified malcontents. As Wikipedia has it, "The spies acted seemingly without Prime Minister Moshe Sharett's knowledge, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion would later resign from his post after being unable to get the full investigation he insisted on." Peres resigned as Deputy Defense Minister in 1965 when his involvement in Lavon was revealed.
In the fifties, Peres was influential in establishing the Dimona nuclear reactor that produced the materials for Israel's still undeclared nuclear arsenal, and he was also one of the prime Israeli architects of the plan to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. But lamentably, current events took up the bulk of the interview, although the recent Gaza offensive with more than a thousand Palestinians dead and tens of thousands wounded and traumatized didn't rate a mention in Hitch's column. Instead the main issue was one that appears close to Hitch's heart: the potentially nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran and its pursuit of "hegemony" in the Middle East. Apparently, Peres would like to reach an agreement with the Palestinians on their future state, so that the Arab world will be able to make peace with Israel and unite against the Iranians.
Hitch asked very delicately about whether Peres had remarked that Iran, too, could be "wiped off the map."
With complete suavity, he assured me that this was meant only as a warning to the Iranian regime that it was not all-powerful.
This response is intriguing because Peres has publicly compared President Ahmadinejad and his call to "wipe Israel off the map" to the genocidal threats against European Jewry made by Chancellor Hitler in the years prior to the Holocaust. Thanks to Juan Cole, Hitch and the rest of us are well aware that Ahmadinejad has made no such remark about Israel, but Peres has done so about Iran. One wonders what he intends to use as an eraser.
Then, Hitch sketched his and Peres's shared perception of an Iran that has ambitions of regional dominance and which consists of "33 million Persians along with an equal number of minorities who are poorly treated," which allows him to pose the question: "How will about 33 million Persians, then, be able to rule over perhaps 300 million Arabs in the rest of the Middle East?"
Hitch's grasp of Middle East population statistics appears to be on a par with the late Charlton Heston's knowledge of the region's geography. As of the 2006 census, Iran's population was officially 70,049,262 and it has grown since, yet Hitch opts for the doubtful figure of 66 million from the CIA, an organization he doesn't usually consider reliable. As for 300 million Arabs in the Middle East, even if for the sake of argument we include Egypt, it is hard to find two thirds of that number. Of the 340 million people living in Arab League nations, 80 million live in Egypt and a further 130 million live in other African nations. But neither mathematical nor geographical detail have have ever been among Hitch's strong points.
The idea of a potentially nuclear-armed Iran having ambitions to recreate the Persian Empire of Xerxes and Darius is about as bizarre as the idea of a nuclear-armed Israel wanting to revive the Kingdom of Soloman and David or of a flying carpet-equipped Al-Qaeda wanting to bringing back the Caliphate. The fertile imaginations of those who dream up such fantasies are matched only by the gullibility of those who swallow them.
I had particularly wanted Hitch, who is genuinely concerned about the risks of nuclear war, as can be seen from his frequent drawing of our attention to the possibility that Iran might be clandestinely planning to develop its own nuclear deterrent, to ask Peres about his role in Israel's nuclear weapons program and about the country's alleged stockpile of about 80 undeclared nuclear warheads and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. No such luck there, but intriguingly Hitch describes Dimona as Peres's "other achievement at the Israeli Defense Ministry." I can't quite work out whether this kudo was written tongue in cheek.
Sadly too, Hitch didn't find the time or the courage to put in a word for Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who told the world about the underground nuclear weapons center at Dimona and was then kidnapped in Italy in 1986 by Mossad on Peres's orders — "Bring the son of a bitch back here" — and has since been subject to imprisonment and subsequent persecution by the Israeli State for the past 23 years — which is even longer than the Burmese State has been persecuting Aung San Suu Kyi.
Israeli President Peres and Turkish President Edrogan had a public bust up at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos after Peres made an impassioned defence of Israel's Christmas and New Year offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
And lastly but by no means leastly, I was terribly disappointed that Hitch rolled over like an Irish Setter in giving Peres a free pass on the question of the Armenian Genocide. In what must be one of his biggest displays of Hitchpocricy ever, our boy wrote three Turkey-bashing Slate pieces in three successive weeks (April 6, 13, & 20) slamming President Obama for not pushing Turkey sufficiently on its failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide issue, then faulting him for not insulting the Turks when speaking at their parliament in Ankara, and finally declaring that "Turkey wants all the privileges of NATO and EU membership but also wishes to continue occupying Cyprus, denying Kurdish rights, and lying about the Armenian genocide." Then, just three weeks after the last of these tantrums, Hitch has the gall to cite Israel's military alliance with Turkey as a reason that "helps explain Peres' strongly held view that the sufferings of the Armenians should not be equated with the Jewish Holocaust."
Last time I looked, the US had a military alliance with Turkey too. I believe it was called NATO. Perhaps that helps explain Obama's strongly held view that there are other ways of dealing with one's allies than waving accusations of century-old genocide in their faces. If it is acceptable for the Israeli President to lie about the Armenian genocide, and OK for Hitch to deny it a capital "G", what grounds does the Great Contrarian have for lecturing the US President or the Turkish Government on how to deal with it?
Things are getting mighty ugly in the cradle of Western civilization. Flooded by refugees or economic migrants (take your pick) with strange clothes and customs from as far afield as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, the Hellenes have gone way beyond Amis-esque adumbrations on teaching the aliens to shape up and are beginning to react like a nation truly under siege from the barbarian hoards. (Before writing in to inform me of what a racist I am, the word "barbarian" comes from the Greek bárbaros, meaning "the sound foreigners make" But why are so many unwelcome foreigners heading for Europe? Could it have anything to do with what the "War on Terror" is doing to places as far afield as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia? Just what is going in Christopher Hitchens's favorite Mediterranean nation?
GREECE: State Itself Becoming Xenophobic By Apostolis Fotiadis
"I can see migrants are the source of many problems," says Maria Nafpliotou, an employee at a music store in the city centre. "Nobody is happy to see them living around here, but I doubt slaying them is a solution."
She says this as she looks out into Omonia square at a demonstration called last week by a group of far-right organisations going under the name 'Residents committees against the invasion of aliens in our country'.
The hundreds of demonstrators flew the Greek flag, played music by Wagner as did the Nazis once, and sang radical marching tunes. 'Blood, Honour, Golden Dawn' went one slogan, Golden Dawn being the name of the most notorious fascist group in the country. The demonstrators attack foreigners, journalists or just anyone who dared show disapproval of the demonstration.
Police stood passively between the extremists and leftist counter- demonstrators, restricting themselves to calming down the angry mob now and then. Their casual way of dealing with the neo-Nazis was unmistakable.
Such demonstrations are not common in Athens, and could be dismissed as isolated events were it not for growing signs over the past few months of an imminent wave of xenophobia in Greece.
Several violent attacks against economic migrants have been reported around Athens city centre during the last month, most notably targeting the Pakistani community.
"The debate about deterioration of migration into a crisis is increasingly taking place in a very negative climate," says Spyros Rizakos, legal representative of the NGO Aitima based in Patra city 250 km southwest of Athens. Thousands of refugees from Afghanistan and Somalia live there in inhumane conditions.
"Nobody discusses what drives thousands of people to such abject conditions, and what the responsibility of the Greek state is for that," Rizakos told IPS. "We illegally do not implement European directives for reception and integration, and have effectively shut the majority of migrants out of asylum procedures; this country is literally a workshop of social exclusion for foreigners."
Ms. Coulter, during a recent appearance on Hannity, opined that waterboarding is not really torture given all the journalists who have been willing to undergo it. At one point she implicitly refers to the Hitch-monster, but since she despises him and doesn't want to even dignify him by mentioning his blasphemous name, she refrains from directly referencing him, though it is clear who she has in mind. The feelings are mutual too. Our Hitch doesn't think very much of The Darling Of The Far-Right either, even if there is no good reason for him to feel this way. After all, he's a good personal friend of David Horowitz, so what's the difference really?
This mutual antagonism is truly a pity, because Chris and Ann really have so much in common. They see pretty much eye to eye and are marching shoulder to shoulder when it comes to liberating Arab nations through the obvious methods, you know, like butchering, bombing, and mass murdering their populations and creating massive humanitarian catastrophes in the lucky countries. You know, helping them. And where Ann has her 9/11 widows, Chris has his Cindy Sheehans. It's also hard to say who's been caught on record having the more repulsive and disgustingly sadistic comment about killing Muslims. For me, Hitchens' rueful lament that the death toll in Fallujah was "not high enough" because "too many escaped," takes the cake to Ms. Coulter's "invade their countries, kill their leaders, convert them to Christianity."
But the question remains: has our boy's little waterboarding publicity stunt had the net effect of empowering the very side it was directed against? Hitchens' gonzo-piece led to Fox News coming up with the idea of having some of their infotainers take the plunge, which is helping desensitize the American people to the technique. And the pro-torture Right make a slippery, even if specious, case concerning waterboarding: If this technique is such manifest torture, then why are all these journalists lining up to have it done to them, with so few qualms about it? Suddenly, average Joe Six-Pack out there in the heartland doesn't think it seems so bad, let alone torture.
So apart from the frivolously theatrical, and typically self-centered, nature of Chris' simulated "waterboarding" gimmick for his VF piece, it seems that he may have even enabled the other side to boot.
Great job Chris.
P.S. Oh, and it's nice to see that Fox News is still trying to convince people that Obama is a Muslim. Hannity is right after all, journalism is dead.
Did former Vice President Dick Cheney personally order the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto? That was the question on quite a few people's minds when they read that veteran investigative jourrnalist Seymour Hersh had made that assertion. After all, old dead-eyed Dick is now known, thanks in no small measure to Seymour's heroic efforts, to have been running his own hit team. So it would be premature to rule out his involvement in the mysterious deaths of anybody standing in the way of his ambitions, from Paul Wellstone to Robin Cook to Pat Tillman to David Kelly to Deborah Palfrey. But it turns out that Seymour has made no such charges against the ex-Veep, and he has publicly denied having done so. But who would want to put about the story that he had?
As is so often the case, the Raw Story has the raw story.
Numerous Internet and mainstream publications picked up the story on Monday. Even The Wall Street Journal linked to unverified sources carrying the story. U.S. conservative magazine The American Spectator also published a blog with the false information.
Hersh told RAW STORY Investigative News Editor Larisa Alexandrovna that he made no such statements.
Following RAW STORY’s Monday evening report, the Journal removed the links from its Web site.
“We’ve tried to reach out to people in the media that we know and correct this,” confirmed Alexa Cassanos, director of public relations at The New Yorker, speaking to this reporter. “We’re not even sure where this came from.”
Web sites which appear to be based in India and Pakistan reported that Hersh made the allegation during an interview with “an Arab television channel.” Outlets which reported this include thenation.com.pk (no affiliation with U.S. news magazine The Nation), webindia123.com, thaindian.com and dawn.com.
The stories also falsely allege Hersh said former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was key to the plot.
Incidentally, here's Banazir in November 2007 telling David Frost that Omah Sheikh murdered Osama Bin Laden. The BBC did not want you to know about this factoid, so they serruptitiously edited it out. This video shows both the original and edited versions of the interview.
Two weeks ago, Benazir's widower, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari, was less candid, but he said that he doesn't believe Osama is alive and that the US intelligence agencies haven't heard of him in seven years. Moreover, he reminds the American interviewer that Osama "was your man."
Back in June, 2005, Christopher Hitchens pulled out all the stops in an effort to sweat out a defense of the Bush administration's conduct of the "War on Terror" in a Slate column intriguingly entitled Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. He contrasted the position of the United States, "a signatory to the Geneva protocols," with that of the forces of al-Qaida and its surrogate organizations, who "are not signatory to the conventions and naturally express contempt for them," and who "are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers—three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law." Likewise, in the past, witches have been burned at the stake and homosexuals have had hot pokers thrust up where the sun don't shine and people who have said things unpleasing to kings and priests have had their tongues cut out. The past is like a foreign country, for they do things differently there. But I digress. This led him to conclude that:
The administration therefore deserves at least some sympathy in its confrontation with an enemy of a new type. I should very much like to know how a Gore administration would have dealt with the hundreds of foreign sadists taken in arms in Afghanistan. I should also like to know how other Western governments, which are privately relieved that the United States assumed responsibility for the last wave, expect to handle the next wave of fundamentalist violence in their own societies. No word on this as yet.
I felt at the time that this was Hitchsterical hyperbole of the fascist crackpot kind. Not only did "we" take hundreds of sadists prisoner, but they were "foreign" sadists too. Are we to take it that if only they'd been domestic sadists we could have given them all gainful employment in the prison service, the National Guard, or the CIA? But moreover, what proof did we have that the hundreds "we" had taken were all or mostly sadists?
Hitch's main aim in the piece was so rebuke Amnesty International for its characterization of Camp Delta as "the gulag of our times." And to this effect, he accused the organization of failing to adhere to its established rule that "no overt political position was to be taken." The point may well be valid, but Hitch couldn't help pushing further out onto the thin ice of unsubstantiated speculation:
And now look. I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion. (And those whose "opinion" is that all infidels must die are not exactly prisoners of conscience.) Morally neutral on this point, apparently, Amnesty nonetheless finds its voice by describing the prison itself as "the gulag of our times." No need to waste words here: Not everyone in the gulag was a "prisoner of conscience," either. But if an organization that ostensibly protects the rights of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and arbitrary detention—replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal execution—then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair. This is not even neutrality between the fireman and the fire. It surely expresses a covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless and sinister, hatred of the United States. If only this were the only symptom of that tendency.
Not everyone imprisoned in the Gulag was tortured either, and not everyone in US care has avoided forced labor, torture, starvation or execution. Certainly the Guantanamo inmates have it warmer than their Siberian equivalents, but without experiencing either the Soviet or the American Gulag system, how is one to judge which offers the better facilities? The likening of one punitive torture camp system to the other did not imply they were equivalent in all major respects, but only that they had many things in common.
Still, to give Hitch due credit, the weaselly boast that "I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion" must have sounded like a defensible point back in 2005. As time went by, however, we learned more than enough about Camp Delta from released prisoners, lawyers, guards and officials to be able to tell the Popinjay that he has another think coming there. One of the most eye-raising accounts of all came as recently as this March, when Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence B. Wilkinson wrote on a blog that a full ninety percent of the people imprisoned at Guantanamo were innocent and, moreover, they were known to have been innocent by the US government the whole time.
— [N]o meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation. This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".
— [S]everal in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released. But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released.
— The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one. For example, Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated... Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man, initially at least.
So, it's finally out in the open that around 700 of the 775 inmates who were kept trussed and caged under the Cuban sun for upto seven years (as of january 2009, 245 detainees remained) — plus God knows how many thousands more who were rendered into hellholes further east — were neither pirates, hijackers, nor torturers, but were in fact innocent people who were victimized by pirates, hijackers and torturers for nefarious ends. Over the years, Christopher Hitchens has staked his reputation on acting as an apologist for this sordid although far-from-little enterprise, and while he is unlikely ever to stand trial for his part in ruining so many people's lives, his name will always be associated his journalistic efforts in support of, to borrow the words of Dick Cheney, "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business."
One of my most favorite cuddly animals is the greatly spotted naturalist Davidius attenboroughii, better known as the common or garden David Attenbrough. Equally at home across a plethora of climate zones and ecosystems, and happy to mate with anything from mountain gorillas to baby seals, David is still going strong at well over eighty and he's just been interviewed by New Scientist about his concern that our planet is overcrowded.
In answer to a reader question about how to teach evolution to students who were raised by creationist parents, he replied with some very sensible advice regarding myth and, by implication, scripture:
Sometimes I'm sorry that my parents brought me up as an agnostic, because I would like to say that I've looked at the various Christian myths, and to say that I found them simply unbelievable. But since my parents encouraged me to think for myself from the beginning, I haven't got any of these myths to discard.
Every society has a creation myth – how do you decide which to believe? The answer is not to look at the written word, but to look at the reality of the world around you. Whether you're in Australia, Tibet or Europe, the facts revealed are the same. That's what the truth is.
Similarly, in answer to a question asking that, given the wonders of nature, wouldn't the suggestion of a designer or creator be a more reasonable explanation than evolution, David replied:
People say: "How you can see hummingbirds, roses, and orchids and not believe in the Lord's splendour"? But if you're going to look at those things, you should look at other things, too.
Imagine an African boy with a parasitic worm boring into his eye. If you tell me God not only created but cares for us all, what about that boy? Are you telling me he says: "I understand. God deliberately created a worm that's going to blind me"? I find that intolerable.
Despite his commitment to evolution by natural selection, David is far from standing in the same pulpit as Hitchens and Dawkins, as the following quotation makes explicit.
"I'm not [an atheist], because, with due respect to Richard Dawkins who is a friend and who I admire, that doesn't seem to me a scientific statement. Often when I open a termites' nest and see thousands of blind organisms working away that lack the sense mechanism to see me, I can't help thinking maybe there's a sense mechanism I'm missing, that there's someone around who created this. We cannot discount that. But I don't know."
I don't open termites' nests nearly as often as David does, but as a fellow Englishman of the old school, I share his concerns about overpopulation, his love of animals and cricket, his sense of fair play, his agnosticism and his disregard for the atheist position. Which brings me onto the main subject of this post — Hitch's well-publicized Ethical Challenge, which in its official form runs: "Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer."
As far as can be ascertained at present, Hitch is still insisting that nobody has been able to answer this conundrum, although a quick Google search turns up dozens of laudable attempts. Just off the top of my head, the ethical statement "God is good" can only be sincerely made by a believer, so it's a pity Hitch wasn't offering a ten-pound note for each correct answer.
One significant problem with the nature of this challenge is that ethics are not universal but are, on the contrary, only valid within a given system of thought. To take a sports analogy, in Soccer, but only in Soccer, it is universally agreed to be unethical to headbutt your opponent or to deliberately touch the ball with your hands (unless you are a goalkeeper, an Arsenal player, or you're making a throw-in), but these things are considered perfectly ethical in Rugby. On the other hand, it is unethical to roll around on the ground wincing in pain after a kick in the shins in Rugby, but it's quite the done thing to win a bit of sympathy in Soccer.
Likewise with ethical statements. In Rugby, it's perfectly permissible to try to wind up a member of the opposing team by informing him that you and the rest of the team frequently enjoy his wife's sexual favors. Of course, this sort of thing happens on the soccer field too, but is generally frowned upon.
The moral here is that if we are asked to name an ethical statement made or an action performed by a member of Group A that could not have been made or performed by a member of Group B, we need first of all to consider whether both groups are bound by the same ethical rules. Hitch's question assumes that there is a universal morality that applies to all people, but he rejects the authority of any universal system that claims a copyright on the rulebook, such as that followed by Our Holy Roman Mother Church or any other established monotheist religion.
But Hitch goes further with his challenge. Several times in his debates on God, he has claimed not just that religion does not make people more ethical, but that it can actually make them less ethical than non-believers. He asserts that religion can make people act badly in ways that they wouldn't act if they were atheists.
Phrased in qualified "can"s, that argument will get no argument from me. The God Squad can kick ass and trample on the rights of outsiders as aggressively as the next bunch of insiders. However, if we turn Hitch's point around, we find we can issue a parallel challenge: "Name me an ethical statement made or an ethical action performed by a non-believer that could not have been made or performed by a believer?" And this is, I think, more interesting than Hitch's original challenge. And as it happens, I have just such statement handy. It comes from Hitch's good friend and fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, and I don't think Hitch is going to like it one bit. It goes like this:
Blaming "wrongdoers" such as rapists, muggers and people who play their records too loud and holding them responsible for their actions is as laughable as Basil Fawlty beating his car with a tree branch (six minutes into the video), and is a habit of mind we will eventually learn to grow out of. According to Dawkins:
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car.
This, I contend, amounts to a very strong ethical statement that no theist could possibly hold to be true. As a scientist, Dawkins is unafraid to take the mechanistic atheist scientific materialist football and run with it in a straight line in the direction of its logical conclusion. As a political polemicist, contrarian contortionist and a non-scientist, Hitchens will happily pick up the ball in order to throw it at his religious targets, but he will only ever run in circles with it.
Hitchens on The Hugh Hewitt Show where they discuss torture. In light of the recent mention of Hitchens in a Frank Rich Op-Ed in The New York Times, and the discussion about a Maureen Dowd column in the Hewitt interview here, I thought it might be appropriate to do this post in a New York Times style today:
EDITORIAL Published: May 16th, 2009
Mr. Hitchens' recent moves to criticize the systemic use of torture practiced by the United States Armed Forces are encouraging and we think he is on the right track, but he does not go far enough, and needs to take further and bolder steps in order to make himself more credible and consistent on the issue.
Mr. Hitchens is right to press the point that the Allies in World War II managed to defeat a far more powerful enemy than Al-Qaeda without finding it necessary to abandon the Geneva Conventions and habeas corpus, and he should continue to emphasize this incontrovertible fact. We do not believe that there is a moral or existential equivalence between the war that was fought against Nazism and contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, but this is a useful and effective argument against those who claim that using torture is essential to protect America and keep her safe. Mr. Hitchens should also be at pains to point out to adherents of so-called enhanced interrogation methods that they bear a heavy burden of proof that the intelligence gathered under torture, which is claimed to have been vital in preventing multiple terrorist attacks since 9/11, could not have been extracted without using torture and other cruel and unusual methods. So far adherents have failed to demonstrably meet this standard. Mr. Hitchens is also in a more unique position than most pundits to vociferously call out waterboarding as torture, having undergone a simulated waterboarding experience himself. He has described it as not an imitation of drowning, but as outright drowning itself. This is a powerful statement coming from Mr. Hitchens, a man who is said to be not particularly averse to any type of excessive drinking, according to a source that spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Where Mr. Hitchens goes wrong however, is his obstinate refusal to hold the real architects of these policies accountable, and his deafening silence and acquiescence towards other aspects of America's violations of international humanitarian law, like extraordinary rendition, CIA secret prisons, black sites, Bagram Air Base, military commissions, and how the US knowingly subsidizes proxies and clients who routinely commit torture, such as the Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. Due to his overwhelmingly quiescent stance on matters like these, Mr. Hitchens is a "fraud" and a "posturing Popinjay," according to a senior HW official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not wish to be identified.
This sort of sentiment is understandable, as omissions as glaring as Mr. Hitchens' almost look like tacit support, especially when put into the larger picture of Mr. Hitchens' casuistry in defense of what was going on in Abu Ghraib earlier in the war, or his claim that it was the American people who forced the Bush Administration to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.
Mr. Hitchens' credibility on this issue is also further strained by his insistence on regurgitating the latest Neoconservative talking points, even when he's not personally in agreement with them, like "his" fear that one of the inmates released from Guantanamo will be responsible for the next terrorist attack, or his swooning over Stanley McChrystal, the new Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, despite Mr. McChrystal's direct role in overseeing torture when he was in charge of Task Force 6-26 as head of the Joint Special Operations Command. Mr. Hitchens' other more well-worn prevarications, like his claim that the US has inflicted a "major battlefield defeat" against Al-Qaeda in Iraq (when the organization is still larger and more powerful today than it was before the invasion, and even at its zenith represented just two or three percent of the insurgency), or his refusal to realize that the jihadists are obviously incited to a significant degree by US foreign policy akin to how the mujahideen were incited by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, does not improve his moral authority on these matters either.
Nevertheless, we are still pleased by Mr. Hitchens' efforts to oppose torture, despite being an imperfect vessel, but he should immediately cast off his neoconservative ties if he is truly sincere about wanting to lay an anchor to the windward of the law. A version of this article appeared in text on May 16, 2009, on page 1 of the Hitchens Watch Blog.
Sorry, Freudian slip. I meant to say "his cups". The image Mark and Soba have been gloating over — and that's enough sexist male chauvinist piggery for one day, boys! — was borrowed via Google images from A Second Hand Conjecture, where we are told "how to order a Hitchens":
Here’s a tip for the uninitiated: When you order a whiskey in a hip bar, request it “Whiskey, Hitchens.” If you’re already slightly sloshed, you might merely say “Hitch me.” What is a Hitchens? It’s not a cocktail, it’s a serving size. It means to fill a glass with scotch whiskey –preferably Johnny Walker– all the way to the rim, in the manner Christopher Hitchens does (see above). This is essentially like ordering a quadruple shot, so I take no responsibility for the state you’ll wander out of the bar in.
As a supplemental device, if a bartender fails to fill the glass to the rim, you can protest “Don’t Dinesh my Hitch!” A nod to Dinesh D’Souza, who is according to Hitchens, his most formidable debating opponent.
Jason adds via email that ordering a Hitchens is an evocative expression of a certain spirit and lifestyle attitude:
“'The Hitchens', in terms of a glass of scotch poured a certain way and to a certain height, embodies the spirit of Christopher Hitchens, a man who doesn’t give a rats ass about you, your feelings, or anything you have to say about his well formed opinions. He can be a great author, debater, commentator, whatever… yet he can still live his life the way you don’t want him to as he goes out every night and gets completely sh*tfaced and in your face. The Hitchens drink embodies that spirit…
The original picture, minus the red arrow, hails from flickr, where it was posted by the Rational Response Squad, a touchy-feely atheist group who like to get together over a few jugs to commune without God. The young lady with the well-endowed cleavage and the captivating smile is named Kelly and, as we can see from this next shot, she also got on very well with Richard Dawkins.
"Johnny Walker Black Label, neat and in a dirty glass!
The name's Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens. And I've been to all three 'Axis of Evil' countries."
Has our Hitch been parodied by Rich Lowry and Keith Korman in their new novel Banquo's Ghosts? And if so, is he entitled to some royalties? These are among the questions raised by Matt Woolsey in his review of their work over at the Forbes site. (Thanks to sharp-eyed Philipa for the tip.)
The title character Stewart Banquo is a classic character of espionage fiction. He's a man of action, a lone wolf who knows how to get things done and cannot stand the red tape of bureaucrats who want to analyze intelligence through computers and data. An analogue patriot living in a digital world, he understands the value of human information gathering, and has covertly deployed his "ghosts" all over the world. Together with another agent, Banquo hatches an assassination plot against an Iranian nuclear weapons scientist in order to prevent an attack on America.
The assassin-to-be, Peter Johnson, is a ruddy-faced, Oxford educated, alcoholic, "morally bankrupt," cantankerous English journalist living in the U.S., who converts from liberalism to supporting U.S. foreign struggles based on his belief in Israel and the horrors of 9/11--which, when described in flashback, have Johnson scrambling for his BlackBerry to make urgent calls, even though Research in Motion ( RIMM - news - people ) didn't make BlackBerry phones until 2002. Johnson drinks, mocks Islam, tries to pull down the beards of the ayatollahs and drinks some more. If, as a main character, Johnson returns Lowry to The New York Times best-seller list, Christopher Hitchens seems entitled to substantial royalties.
Hitch certainly won't like being fictionalized under the surname of his fellow old Oxfordian dipsomaniac scribbler and former adversary "Mad" Paul Johnson (who obtained a second-class honours degree ad Magdalen). But more to the point, is there any chance of life imitating art with Christopher adding the role of Middle East assassin to his already bulging curriculum vitae? After all, he has been doing a fair amount of travel to that part of the world of late, and with precious little but a black eye and few cracked ribs to show for it. Could the beating in Beirut be a cover story for something much more sinister?
You've read the book. You've seen the stage play. Now get ready for the movie. This is a sneak peak trailer of the first 13 minutes of Darren Doane's forthcoming documentary Collision. The film follows renowned author and anti-theist Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson as they debate the topic: "Is Christianity Good For The World?"
You boys know the rules. There will be no punching after the bell, no hits below the belt, and absolutely no mixing of epistemology with ontology. And the contest will be decided on the basis of three falls from grace, three moral submissions, or a knockout.
You Nazi! You Son of a shit! Fuck You! Bastards! This is my house. This is My Land. God gave it to me!
With Hitch reporting in Slate this week on his mano-a-mano interview with Israel's President Shimon Peres (more about that soon), it's time for Hitchens Watch to take another look at life the Holy Land — where shepherds watched their flocks by night and water was turned into wine; also known variously as the Primised Land, the Land of Cannan, the Land of Milk and Honey, Judea, Palestine, Israel and most recently, with increasing bitterness and exasperation at what's going on within its borders, as the Shitty Little Country.
My heart goes out to the Palestinian people, it really does. Here at HW we often have to put up with the most foul-mouthed obnoxious little trolls who aparently have nothing better to do than to hurl hate-filled personal abuse at us in a determined if demented effort to wipe us off the face of the blogosphere. And doubtless in response to this post we'll be subjected to a few more slings and arrows from the blood brothers of these high-spirited youngsters who intimidate Palestinian farmers for sport.
But for the poor powerless Palestinians, even those of of them who are fortunate enough to still be living in their ancestral homes with a few fields, a few goats and a few olive trees, the situation is unimaginably tougher than it is for us denizens of cyberspace. In the short video above, we see an example of the sort of provocation any rural Palestinian family may be forced to put up with from the local immigrant trash at any time. In this cosy little corner of the Middle East's Shining Beacon of Democracy, there are no cops to call on for protection and no recourse to the law. And any Palestinian farmer dares to put up the sort of resistence that these rascals deserve, they are likely to have their trees cut down, their house bulldozed, their well poisoned, or something worse.
This time, the bullies were frustrated in their efforts because they happened to be met with some sensible, firm but non-confrontational resistence from some white foreigners (in this case the main speaker sounds like an Aussie), which was enough to cause them to sensibly back off, tails between legs, but not without pouring out a torrent of whining invective that included death threats, insults, self-justifying rationalizations, and my persoonal favorite: a taunt of "We killed Jesus and we're fucking proud of it!"
Indoctrinated from a young age with race supremicist ideas, these drunken settlers are the frontline tools of the Israeli state, acting as the scum of settlers have so often acted down the centuries with total contempt for the indigenous natives they are out to surplant — just ask any Tasmanian. The real mendacity, the nexus of evil, lies at the highest levels of the Israeli state, with the likes of President Peres and his colleagues and backers. These are the people who have turned Palestine into a land of anguish, ruin and despair, cut up by concrete "fences", barbed wire and military checkpoints. It's way past time their flirtation with the worst aspects of 19th century colonialism was aborted.
Here are the videos of Wanda Sykes at the White House correspondents' dinner, giving the performance Hitchens reportedly characterized as:
The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling," he said. "The black dyke got it wrong. No one told her the rules."
Plenty of folks who don't share Hitch's idiosyncratic sense of humour might well argue that she got it just right, and that the Popinjay's appeal to "the rules" is a cryptic admission that he just doesn't get it, just like he didn't get it earlier this year in Beirut.
It is a truism to claim that profundities often lurk in good humor. Wanda Sykes performance last night at the White House Correspondents dinner was a prime example of the truth wrapped in a joke.
Midway through her routine. Ms Sykes started railing against the very idea that anyone could defend the use of torture. "Torture" she bellowed a few times shaking her head and laughing ironically. After a pause, she turned her shotgun wit on the quail hunter- Dick Cheney.
Cheney, rehearsed Sykes, wants the reports open that show that we were able to drown useful information out of terrorists by waterboarding them! That, quipped Sykes with a beaming smile and her arms outstretched, would be like getting caught robbing a bank and going before the judge saying "Yeah I robbed the bank but look at all the bills I paid!" Bulls eye Wanda!
On an individual level crisis is no excuse for suspending adherence to the law. People who lose their jobs are not given a pass for acts of thefts because they are looking after the interests of their family.
Suppose the economy got so bad that health clinics were closing in my community. I could not pull a heist at the local gambling casino, use the funds for the clinic, and expect the courts to wink at my burglary because it promoted the general welfare.
We cannot, as individual or nations, unilaterally decide that some special circumstance makes breaking the law acceptable. If anything, the law is there as a guidewire in difficult times. It is easy enough for people to treat one another well when they are passengers on a cruise. When times get tough, people of character do not send their laws up the chimney.
The argument that we should accept the use of torture because it enhances our security, suggests that rather than being the home of the brave, the United States is home to a people who will break international law and cash in their sacred principles whenever they feel seriously threatened. Cheney's utilitarian defense of torture is an insult to the people he once represented.
Perhaps the pasty-faced hack with borderline Tourette's Syndrome's humanitarian sentiments don't extend as far as condemning the practice of torture in front of some of the very people responsible under US and international law for ending it and prosecuting the its architects. Or then again, perhaps he just has issues with uppity black lesbian comediennes.
Just as Christopher Hitchens and his fellow Muslim-bashers' hard line against fascism with an Islamic (veiled or turbanned) face has probably contributed incrementally to a rise in people signing up for crusade and jihad alike, we now have evidence that the efforts of his pals at Atheists Against Creationism are having the effect of, you guessed it, making Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection harder to teach in US schools.
A district court judge in southern California has ruled that a teacher who described creationism as "superstitious nonsense" was making a religious statement, which is impermissible in US public schools. On the face of it, this is completely absurd, even for southern California. Creationism is superstitious nonsense, and teachers should be able to say so. But when you look at the background, the case becomes in some respects less absurd, but also more threatening – especially for hardline rationalists such as Richard Dawkins, who would like to dismiss creationism as beneath contempt....
Clearly, Corbett walked into a trap that had been dug specifically for him. The fundamentalist lawsuit demanded that he be sacked, rather than pay damages, though both the school and the judge rejected this demand.
From the material quoted in the judgment it does look as if Corbett was the kind of atheist concerned to eradicate religious belief; but you might argue that he was just trying to get students to think. He claimed to have been selectively quoted in some instances, but in any case we are up against one of the irregular verbs that make teaching difficult: "I make them think; you propagandise; he is trying to indoctrinate them."...
Creationism summed up one of its wittier critics. Lamentably, more and more of what passes for science and many other fields of human enquiry these days operate along lines much closer to those of the method on the right, which can more generally be called "The Dogmatic Method".
The case looks like a particular defeat for the NCSE, which has been fighting for years to establish in the public mind that evolution and religion are perfectly compatible. For its pains it has been reviled by hardliners – Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, and their followers – as "accommodationist", "Neville-Chamberlain-atheist", and so on....
It is unconstitutional, Judge Selna points out in his ruling, to propagandise for atheism in US state schools. The result of this case, as the philosopher Michael Ruse has long warned, is that evolution becomes harder to teach, and creationism harder to mock, because science and atheism have become so entangled in the public mind.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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